Archive for June, 2008

I’ve been so busy recently, I’ll post more soon… but just to let everyone know that I’ll be selling all of my products every Thursday at the Century City Farmers Market btw 11am-2pm (the hours on the website are out of date). It’s my first farmers market, and I’m super excited to sell directly to people on a regular basis and get to know customers face-to-face. And it turns that I can (just) fit a canopy tent and two small tables into my l’il Beetle along with my products, and me.

So, stop by if you have a chance! This Thursday, July 3, might be a good time, because I suspect that most people who work in the area will be leaving early and it’s going to be a pretty sparse day… so I’ll have time to talk. 🙂

And I want to add a weekend market in a residential area once I can find one that has an opening for a confectioner and is the right fit. I’d like to stay within the central L.A. area. Santa Monica markets are all impossible for me to get into, as are some of the more popular ones, too, for now… I wouldn’t mind going to the Valley, except that it’s significantly hotter there… So I’ll see how it goes.

Oh, and I also look forward to blogging about what it’s like to be a vendor at a farmers market.

Part of the fun of having a blog is being able to share things that I like with my readers, and part of the fun of having my own artisan business is meeting others with similar businesses… So, this post combines the two.

I’ve gotten to to know Jenna from Whimsy & Spice, a Brooklyn-based artisan sweets company that she and her husband, Mark, founded a few months ago. They specialize in handmade cookies and marshmallows that taste as delicious as they look on their website and etsy shop (they also sell at the Brooklyn Flea). In some ways, I think of them as “the east coast me’s,” and aside from the fact that they’re in my native Brooklyn, I think it’s because their flavor combinations are exactly the kind that I like — honey and lavender shortbread, chocolate chilli cashew biscotti (cashew, my favorite nut!), chocolate orange cardamom shortbread (I tinkered with cardamom in my Orange Bar, but couldn’t get it just right, so this cookie fills in the gap of flavor/texture that works for the combination), cinnamon chocolate malt biscotti (Malt in a cookie! I also tinkered with putting malt in the shortbread of my Malt Bar), rose and black pepper thumbprints, and well, all of their others. Their shortbread cookies also happen to be in my favorite shape — something about scalloped edges for cookies with a delicate snap makes them taste better. They make marshmallows, as well, and we don’t even overlap our flavors. So, if you’ve been wanting chocolate or caramel marshmallows, now you know where to find them.

There really should be a picture of me taking this picture on here, because I was just as happy as I could be when I used my new tamis (aka drum sieve) to shake off the cornstarch/conf sugar from my marshmallows a couple weeks ago.Â Previously, I’d used a standard strainer, like what would fit over a pot, for my marshmallow sieving.Â It comfortably fit about 8-10 marshmallows at a time, and the loose particles would fly everywhere b/c it was bowl shaped — and the starch makes it pretty stubborn to clean surfaces of it thoroughly.Â Somehow it got me through “The Weekend of a 1,000 Marshmallows,” but my drum sieve would have saved me so much time and clean up (since the above pic, I’ve become even more efficient by sieving over a large bowl — the decrease in wandering particles has been dramatic).Â It’s still small-scale, but now I look forward to sieving like I never have before.

See, they look just like caramels… This is the cinnamon almond, salted chocolate nut, and classic. The wildflower honey and scotch look a lot like the classic (which is why they can’t be in a mixed bag together, aside from possible mingling of aromas/flavor).